Aurel State – “he had an unbounded courage and an unwavering dignity”
During my long years of imprisonment, I met three people who, as the saying goes, “saw death with their own eyes”; they could rightly claim to have returned from beyond the grave: [Ștefan Dragomir, Lieutenant Colonel Botezatu and Aurel State] […].
A few months later, after my trial, in the same prison in Pitești, I was in the same cell with another former POW whom I came to love and admire more than I can say: Aurel State. Originally from a village near Cîmpulung, he had studied to be a teacher (he had attended the Pedagogical High School) and had volunteered for military service before the age of 20.
When war broke out against Russia, he was a sergeant in a motorised infantry battalion that had not been sent into action. He repeatedly asked to be sent to the front in a combat unit. The colonel, who did not want to lose such a good instructor, refused each time. Finally, State deserted and went to the front on his own; there he joined a mountain hunter battalion (I don’t remember the details of the case and how he escaped the desertion penalty; I think the mountain hunters were the unit he had originally volunteered for before being transferred to the motorised battalion).
At the front, from the very beginning, he proved himself to be an incomparable fighter. He was soon given command of a platoon whose men simply adored him, and was used in all the shock operations of his corps. He was a true fighter, not just a reckless brave soldier. He would meticulously prepare in advance every detail of the attack he was to carry out, studying the layout of the land, every topographical detail, the enemy’s positions, morale and likely reactions, leaving as little as possible to chance. Only when he had all the data in his possession did he launch the attack. Success followed success. He was awarded the highest Romanian and German military decorations, both before and after his promotion to officer, and was cited on numerous occasions. Twice wounded, he refused to be discharged and once ran away from the hospital to return to his beloved platoon. He was a consummate fighter in every sense of the word.
When the army was forced to withdraw from the Crimea, his unit was sacrificed to cover the withdrawal of the main forces and he was eventually taken prisoner. As a prisoner he continued to fight, this time for his rights under the Geneva Convention; he refused to do work that the regulations did not allow officers to do and was repeatedly punished. He was constantly moved from one camp to another, including the Vorkuta labour camp beyond the Arctic Circle. In the German officers’ camps where he stayed, he learnt German and managed to acquire an extensive knowledge of German culture and literature. He also learnt Russian and read all the classic Russian literature he could get his hands on. In the mid-1950s, he was sent to Romania with the other prisoners of war and managed to enrol in German at the University of Bucharest. In his second year, if I am not mistaken, he was arrested together with Colonel Botezatu and accused of conspiring with other former POWs against the communist regime. The accusation was apparently based on the fact that the former POWs had gathered to attend the funeral of one of their fellow officers.
The investigation took place in the former army arsenal, which had been converted into a Securitate prison. They were subject to the same system of absolute isolation that we all know too well, no communication with the outside world, microphones in all the cells so that the slightest whisper could be heard. Daily 10-20 minute walks, in single file, to an inner courtyard where they were led in single file, holding the mine, with dark glasses over their eyes so they couldn’t see anything on the way.
State never gave me any details of his interrogation, but I could well imagine what it was like when he told me that the investigators had brought him to a state where he feared he could not hold out any longer and would rather commit suicide than betray his comrades. It was not easy to commit suicide during an investigation in which you were under strict observation day and night, and your tie, belt and shoelaces were taken away from you. State examined the possibilities with the same meticulousness with which he had prepared his raids on the enemy trenches.
When he was taken for his daily walk, he discovered, peering out from under his glasses, the base of an iron ladder, a fire escape fixed to the wall. He counted the steps to the ladder, both to get there and back from his walk. He planned to suddenly let go of the hands of the man in front of him and behind him (in line), take off his glasses and sprint up the ladder, which probably led to the roof of the building, and from there plunge into the courtyard. His only fear was that this staircase did not also have a locked barrier at the top, as is sometimes done to prevent thieves from gaining access – in which case he would have been easily caught and made a fool of. He judged that there was a good chance that the staircase did not have such a barrier, and decided to give it a try. Under his glasses he could see that the two (security) guards, one at the front and one at the back of the line, were not wearing gun holsters because they did not want him to be shot, wounded, but captured alive.
On D-Day, he did as he had planned; he wrenched his hands from those of his neighbours, took off his glasses and ran up the ladder. The two guards were so astonished that he had climbed a good way up the ladder before either of them could follow him. State reached the top of the roof, grabbed the edge of the roof below which was the cobbled courtyard to ensure a quick death, and threw himself down.
I stayed with State for two years after his suicide attempt. Physically he was a wreck. There was hardly a bone in his body that wasn’t broken or fractured. He couldn’t move without crutches because of his pelvic fracture, which hadn’t healed (the situation was the same 5 years later when we met again, on the run, on the eve of our release from prison). He could barely use his crutches because the bones in one of his arms had hardened into a vicious position, and he was in excruciating pain all over his body.
Morally, he was superb: he had boundless courage and a bearing of unshakable dignity; a dazzling intelligence and an unusual sensitivity to beauty, expressed in any form: literature, music or art. I may mention here that the Crimean Tatars, whom he had come to love, had translated his name “Aurel” (diminutive of the word “gold”) into “Altyn”, the Tatar and Turkic word for “gold”; in the Crimean villages he was known by this name. They were not wrong: his character was, and I hope still is, of the purest gold.
One day, while we were in the same cell, he was taken away for questioning and returned half an hour later badly beaten. The interrogator had propped him up against the wall, crutches and all, and beaten him with his fists. This had not happened to him in the 15th century, under the Spanish Inquisition, but in the 20th century, under a regime that prided itself on humanity. […]
(Radu R. Rosetti – Revista Memoria No. 5, pp. 127-129)